ABOUT / MELANIE JAYNE SANCHO TAYLOR

Photographic archive expertise, brought into your home.

A woman with shoulder-length gray hair, wearing a pink long-sleeve blouse, stands in front of a metal shelving unit filled with boxes and folders. She is smiling and has her hands clasped in front of her.

I founded Your Photo Legacy to offer bespoke solutions to one of the most common yet overlooked problems of the 21st century: the vast and ever-increasing quantity of our personal photographs and memories that remain unmanaged, dispersed across multiple locations and at risk of becoming permanently lost.

My mission is to help you take charge of your family’s story and personal heritage - with the expertise to ensure your photographs and family materials are organised, understood and protected over time.
Albums, photographs and family materials from a personal photographic collection
Family photographs carry far more than the image we can see.

The story behind Your Photo Legacy

My reason for creating Your Photo Legacy began with my own family. My parents had both inherited boxes upon boxes of photographs, albums, correspondence and memorabilia. Alongside these were a lifetime of their own materials, stored in deteriorating cardboard boxes and plastic tubs, as well as more than two decades of digital photographs dispersed across hard drives, cloud accounts and outdated media.

I could see how a collection that was supposed to bring them joy had instead become a source of distress and overwhelm. It was not the quantity of material that concerned me, but the knowledge that so much of our family history existed only in their memories: the names, relationships and stories that gave the photographs their meaning. If that knowledge was not recorded, it could so easily be lost.

Drawing on my professional experience with photographic archives, I knew I had the specialist skills to help. I also realised that my parents were far from alone!

Families everywhere are becoming the custodians of growing collections that span generations, from inherited albums, scrapbooks, photographs and slides to an ever-increasing number of digital images.

What began as a personal quest to preserve my own family’s photographic history became a commitment to helping other families care for theirs.

Melanie Jayne Sancho Taylor, founder of Your Photo Legacy

Experience and approach

A background in photography, archives and preservation.

With more than a decade of experience organising, digitising and preserving photographic collections at the British Library in London and the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne, I bring professional archival expertise into the homes of families who want their collections cared for with thought and intention.

I’m a Certified Photo Manager, trained in Information Management, and a contemporary photographic artist whose work explores personal archives and memory.

I combine this unique background with a deep passion for helping families create beautifully organised, meaningful family archives that can be enjoyed now and understood by generations to come.

The experience behind this work includes:

10+ years’ photographic collection experience

State Library of Victoria · British Library

Certified Photo Manager

The Photo Managers

Information Management

Graduate Certificate · RMIT University

Preservation Training

Preserving Photographic, Film and Sound Records · University of Dundee

Contemporary Art Practice

Photographic artist exploring archives, memory and photographic materiality

BEGIN WITH YOUR COLLECTION ARCHIVE SERIES / 01

Your photographs.
Your stories.
Your legacy.

We begin with what you have, what matters most, and what you want your collection to become.

Begin with a Collection Assessment